Background
I am a person who was exposed to programming as a whole through the school syllabus, which meant the first IDE I ever saw was Notepad.
It didnt help that the first “language” I faced was HTML, which isnt the best thing to use when you must manually type </element> every single time, with no idea what indentation is.
Soon I was quite fed up with the classic ‘centering div’, which was the last straw.
Clarification
It is not to say that i did not try any other language. Python was my first choice, in 2015, with the discovery of Coursera as a platform. Back in those days (it might just have been that course), they had a course which started months later, which was too much for my distractive mind. leading me down the path of installing it myself, then watching windows fail to provide a good dev experience, and giving up.
Unity and Game Development
It was next year that I decided to try game development. And installed Unity with an ‘addon’ called Visual Studio. I was quite eager to get started and began with the classic Brackeys tutorial.
It too was short lived as I failed to realise i still knew nothing about programming and was out of luck when the tutorial was using an older version.
I did infact come back to the same tutorial years later to overcome the previous hurdle. Ofcourse, still havent completed the playlist.
The Modern Dark Ages
It was in the new decade that i picked up programming again thanks to my fathers recommendation of pursuing certifications. I picked up python again, taking a year to complete it due to the dark ages burnout, among other things, coming out of the ages with several hobby projects and a handful of proper ones.
This was the pre Microsoft VSCode era, so there were a variety of IDEs to choose from. But I did end up switching to VSCode soon after, thanks to sublime being difficult to deal with. I have since switched to emacs, zed, and the IntelliJ suite. Yes, it does sadden me that astro does not support org files :(
It did help that I had gotten interested in Linux, which had a far better experience when it came to development and installation as a whole (probably the reason why WSL exists).
This then spiraled into C++, LaTeX (thanks to not wanting to write math answers on paper only to submit online), C# (the unity bender), Rust, then finally, after college forcing my hand, Java, which was as bad as they say it is, but not as bad as C++ due to the jvm, which sucked more than gcc. Finally picking up web development in the form of raw html css jss.
Current Times
Ofcouse there have been tangents, like production apps, docker, kubernetes, kernel development and RISC-V assembly. Since the last solstice, I have decided to move away from active development to work on breaking programs, which is a lot more fun than making them. Though admittedly, the progress has been a lot slower than it was in the dark ages, of my own accord, obviously.